We the people— if we are to survive— must learn the hard music of truth, and sing it without disguises.
We must name what happened: the ships, the chains, the stolen ground; the classroom that closes like a door; the wage that will not lift a family; the river made into profit, the sky treated as a ledger, the future spent like loose change.
We the people, alone and together, have grown thin-skinned in spirit—
afraid of the honest mirror, eager to place our fault in another’s hands, quick to heat our hearts into anger, certain of our own innocence, suspicious of clear intelligence, ready to kneel to superstition.
As Americans we cannot easily escape our past: there has been murder in our story— some loud, some lawful, some slow—
lives taken in daylight, dreams taken in paperwork, humanity taken one small denial at a time.
Yet I do not believe we were made for brutality.
Beneath the armor there is a gentler nation— not spotless, but capable of tenderness.
We like to imagine the world as a place of harmless pleasures, and ourselves as merchants of delight—
a smiling people, a generous people, a good people.
And still— we have been pulled into fantastic crimes, and now a fog of collective guilt moves through our rooms and our streets,
warping the mind, twisting the tongue, teaching us to speak
around the wound instead of into it.
It seems the more we gather, the less we belong; the more we prosper, the less we are one.
We are crippled by illusions—
by myths that flatter, by superstitions that soothe, by power-games that replace community, by dogma that calls itself faith while starving the heart.
Ever vainglorious, ever intolerant, we have made these habits extravagant— until they glitter like madness
and we call it normal.
We are ordinary folk, but if we are to survive we must become great—
great enough to be humble, great enough to listen, great enough to be corrected
without turning correction into war.
As Americans, we must cultivate an inward curiosity
about the living soul— about personality, about difference, about the slow, sacred work
of a person becoming whole.
We must recover the rare power of seeing our neighbors
not as a crowd, not as a threat, not as a slogan,
but as singular human beings—
each with a private history, each with a particular hunger, each carrying a need that cannot be mocked away.
We must learn a politics that keeps a warm hand—
a social policy with loving-kindness in its bloodstream,
justice with a human face,
law with a tender spine.
We the people must nurture the triumphant, rapid progress of the human spirit—
not the progress of machines alone, not the progress of money alone,
but the progress of mercy, the progress of courage, the progress of conscience.
If we are to survive, we must lay down our loyalty to fate—
our fatalism, our shrug, our “that’s just how it is”—
and take up again the difficult, radiant power of love:
love that tells the truth, love that does not flee from history, love that refuses to hate, love that builds a wider table, love that makes a nation
Desert Dweller 